


how karen got bullied into loving tricia

by Anonymous



Category: South Park
Genre: F/F, Pointless, Social Anxiety, i intended it to be romantic but if you like it better as friends thats cool, kenny and kevin are good brothers, selective mutism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:20:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24291970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: karen can't talk in front of people that aren't her family but tricia talks enough for both of them so it's okay
Relationships: Karen McCormick/Tricia Tucker
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17
Collections: Anonymous





	how karen got bullied into loving tricia

On my first day of first grade, the teacher sat us on the rug and taught us how to take attendance. She made it silly; she told us a bunch of things not to say when she called our names. She was old, with very soft bloodhound skin that wobbled a little when she moved her head. I fell in love with her at first sight, the way only little kids do. I wanted her to love me, too.  
She went through the names. A few of the boys made things harder than they had to be, but everybody eventually raised their hand and said ‘here,’ or ‘present’ if they wanted to show off. She got to the luh, luh, L names. Nobody has O names. Then came me. I was ready. I was gonna raise my right hand. I had it planned. She said, “Karen McCormick.”  
It hadn’t been so quiet when everyone else was going. It felt like my body was filling up with lava. I opened my mouth a little, but I couldn’t remember how to make my throat open and make the words come out. I suddenly realized I didn’t know where words came from, inside of me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t raise my hand.  
The teacher repeated my name. I still couldn’t move. My face was so hot it hurt. Her eyes caught mine. Instantly, I knew she understood what was happening to me. It was a relief. It was a thing that happened. She looked me in the eye as she asked, “Are you Karen McCormick?”  
I could only barely nod my head.  
Graciously, she moved on. The next few kids went without incident, until she got to tuh, tuh, T, and a girl raised her hand with the bad finger.  
Eventually the blood leaked out of my head, but it bubbled up again whenever anyone tried to talk to me. It only happened a couple of times; the teacher tried to very gently lead me into saying something quietly just to her a few times. It killed me to disappoint her with my silence. We did a practice run of using the cafeteria in the morning, and then a little later we went through the real thing. Everybody else had little blue paper cards, or baggies of dollars and change. I was the only one with a big yellow plastic card. When the lunch lady took it, she passed it back to me under her little table, like she didn’t want the other kids to see.  
I found a spot by myself at our assigned table. My tray was so heavy. I’d never had so much food to myself in my life. It just made me feel smaller and more overwhelmed.  
The girl who raised the bad finger dropped her tray on the opposite side of the table, directly in front of me. She had pigtails like me, but they were tied up with pretty red bows. She smiled. She scared me.  
“Can you talk?” She asked, so loud. I looked down to my tray. “You can’t? Are you dumb? Is there something stuck in your throat? Like did you swallow an apple or something? Here, it’s easy: just open your mouth and go like this. La, la, la.” She waited for me to make an attempt. I didn’t. As if forgetting I couldn’t talk, or just not caring, she asked, “Do you like One Direction? I like Harry. He can get it.”  
I didn’t know what One Direction was, who Harry was, or what he could get.  
The girl started eating her spaghetti, though she never stopped talking. “I have an iPad at home. I’m allowed to watch whatever I want on Youtube. I saw a video, and some girl’s mom sold her to One Direction. I love Harry, but I wouldn’t want to be sold to anyone. I’d want to marry him. If you get sold to someone, they can make you do their chores and be mean to you, and you can’t leave. It’s really bad. My brother’s really mean to me, but I just hit him. If Harry tried to be mean to me, I would hit him into the hospital. There’s this game I like called Roblox. My brother’s boyfriend gave me a bunch of robux for my birthday. My brother didn’t get me anything. He sucks. I like Tweek better. I wish Tweek was my brother. I wouldn’t let him be boyfriends with my brother. I’d say, ‘get a nice boyfriend or you’re not allowed.’ And if he didn’t listen I’d flip him off.”  
She had sauce on her face, and on the table. She picked up her little cup of pears and, standing to reach, she set it on my tray. “Here, I don’t like fruit. I’ll trade you my garlic bread for some of your spaghetti. I don’t like food with green stuff on it. I like garlic bread from pizza places, cuz they’re just yellow. They don’t have the little green things on it. My parents try to make me eat vegetables, and I flip them off. Fruit and vegetables are disgusting. I like meat and bread. But not when it’s got green stuff on it. I think that stuff’s vegetables.”  
She stood again. She relocated the two cups of pears to the table, and then put my piece of garlic bread in the empty slot on her tray where the spaghetti used to be. She took my tray and set to work on the spaghetti.  
“I like you. You do what I want. Wanna be my best friend?”  
I didn’t say yes, but I didn’t say no, either. To her, this seemed to count as a yes.  
After lunch, the teacher sent me to the school nurse. She closed the curtains around the little bed and let me eat cheese crackers and drink juice all by myself.

Her name was Tricia Tucker. She never stopped to tell me, but barely an hour in class could go by without the teacher saying, “Tricia Tucker, you stop that right now” or something like that. I was terrified of her, despite being her best friend. She never cared when she got in trouble, so I would cry and be scared for her. It felt like someone had to. Sometimes, I would go home and tell my mom I did things that Tricia had actually done. The first couple times, I got spankings, which were kind of a relief. It was balance. Eventually, my mom called the teacher. After that, when I would tell her I got in trouble for fighting or for flipping off the teacher, she’d carefully ask, “Did you do that, or did your friend?”  
My inability to speak didn’t get better. At home, every part of my body cooperated with me. At school, it was like there were big bubbles inside me, and they blocked off my throat and my brain from the rest of me. Once a week I’d sit with Mr. Mackey and he would tell me that social anxiety was bad, and that if I had social anxiety, that was bad, mmkay. When they told me what I had was called selective mutism, I thought they were calling me a mutant. I lived with that for a long time. I thought there was something wrong with my body, like I was born with a disease or like my mouth wasn’t right.  
Tricia didn’t care. Without my realizing it, she started interpreting my body language. She’d say, “let’s play on the monkey bars,” and just from the way I stood, she’d instantly know I was refusing. She’d ask why, and I would look or point at what I wanted to do. Usually we’d end up doing what she wanted anyway, but at least we were communicating in some way.   
By the end of first grade, I could quietly whisper things to the teacher and Mr. Mackey. I never whispered to Tricia. I didn’t have to.

There were mean and bad kids at school. The third and second graders would bully the first graders during the first half of recess, when we were all outside at the same time. It only took a couple times for everyone to figure out that being mean to me meant making my guardian angel mad. Sometimes older kids would be mean to Tricia, but it never really flt like she was getting bullied. They’d take her toys, and she’d kick them super hard between their legs, and then it would be over. Even when they hit her, she just hit back, and she never cried.  
In second grade, we were in the same class again. I was glad. I wasn’t much better. I could mouth words now, and raise my hand, and nod and shake my head when I had to. On the first day of the second week of school, during recess, and older girl with long braids pushed me to the ground and stomped on my hand. I cried so loud, but my guardian angel didn’t come.  
“He’s in middle school now, isn’t he?” Tricia asked as she helped me to my feet. I asked who she meant without saying anything, and she shrugged me off.  
The next day, before class started, she pulled me over to her desk. She opened up the top to show me the inside, just a little. I thought it was a snake at first. I almost jumped back. But she opened it a little more. It was a braid. There were little bits of skin and scabs on one end.  
“I caught her in the park after school,” she whispered. “She cried like a little pussy bitch.”  
Tricia wasn’t quite a guardian angel. I never really thought of him as human. I thought he just blipped into existence when I needed him. Hanging out with Tricia, knowing she had that bloody braid in her desk, kind of scared me. I felt like it was my fault, for letting that girl bully me. I felt like I needed to apologize to the girl.  
My guardian angel knew karate and had cool weapons and was big. Tricia was the tallest girl in our class, and she had a pair of safety scissors she tore in half so she could just use one as a shiv, but nobody was really afraid of her. If anything, people went out of their way to fight with her. And a lot of the time, the best way to get her attention was to pick on me. Tricia gave me the other half of her scissors and told me it made us gang sisters. I threw my half in the creek.  
Tricia had friends that weren’t me. I didn’t have friends that weren’t Tricia. Her friends would sort of tolerate me tagging along, but it was like I was Tricia’s dog or something. I was just following. While they did bad stuff, I’d just stand, not even brave enough to be lookout. And when they got caught, and they all scattered and ran, I would stand stock still until Tricia grabbed my hand and pulled me along after her. The only time I served any purpose in the group was when they had a question about adult stuff. Just to sate their curiosity, I tied off my arm with a long piece of grass and mimed shooting up. I drew naked men with my best approximation of a penis and squared-off women with massive piles of pubic hair. I didn’t want to, not really, but I was desperate for them to think of me as more than just Tricia’s friend.  
Third grade, Tricia and I were in separate classes. I could talk in front of an audience of no more than one person, with my mouth all cottony and my tongue too big and the words coming out muffled and tangled-up. The teacher wasn’t so nice. She’d grab my forearm and pull me into the hall and sigh really hard and say, “What?” The other kids picked up on it. I was the class burden. The kids told me to just stay home, to go to a different school, to just leave. The nicer ones would surround me and try to teach me to talk, talking to me like I was some kind of baby. I hated that the most. Tricia and I would still meet up at recess, but she and her friends would talk about their teacher and their classmates I didn’t know and things that had happened earlier when I wasn’t there. I cried every day.  
On the night before the first day of fourth grade, I hid in the bottom of the covered slide at the park, sitting in a puddle of cold, dirty water. I stayed there all night. Kenny and Kevin both skipped school to look for me. Kevin found me early in the afternoon, but he didn’t take me home. He bought me a gas station milkshake and we spent the day trying to catch tadpoles in red plastic cups down at Stark’s pond. Mom was mad at me. Kevin let me sleep in his bed with him, which he hadn’t done since he was eleven. I woke up alone to the sound of my brother’s voices through the wall.  
The next day Kenny skipped school and we played hide and seek in Walmart and ate a bunch of food and left the boxes so no one knew we were stealing. Kenny always said that taking stuff from major corporations isn’t stealing. The third day Kenny took me into Raisins from the back entrance. He talked to the girls, doing a lot of winking and calling them baby and making vague promises I didn’t understand, and I sat at the bar all day and read and drew and talked with the bartender. She was a really nice girl with really big boobies. My mom never really had boobs. I was mesmerized by them, the same way a really big bug or a broken arm with a new, extra joint mesmerized me. I just wanted to understand and memorize them. She gave me lemonades and complimented my drawings.  
That night, the school called the house.  
Kenny and Kevin yelled and fought with Dad and pushed Mom and she pushed back and there was a lot of cussing and I felt really guilty and selfish. The morning after, Mom took me to school. She walked me into the building and dropped me off in the classroom and talked to the teacher. The kids stared. They whispered. My throat was closing—not in the way that made it so I couldn’t talk, but in a way that made it so I couldn’t breathe. My mom and the teacher spoke in friendly, easy voices that got sucked up into the big empty sky over me, catching on the rest of the world and pulling it out from under me like a rug.  
I woke up in the back of the car. The next day, my mom got me registered for online school.

Elementary school passed. Middle school passed. I took on a lot of the chores around the house. It helped, I think. Everything was a little cleaner. A little more bearable. When I turned fifteen, I started washing dishes down at the Waffle House where my mom worked. I didn’t mind one bit. The dishwashing machine was so loud, and everyone was so busy, nobody noticed I couldn’t talk. Kevin got a girl pregnant and moved to a town up north, not too far. Dad kicked Kenny out the day he turned eighteen. He stayed in town, moving in with his nice friend with the stutter.  
The corner store ran out of Dad’s brand. If he had to, he’d drink hand sanitizer, but he told me to walk to the gas station not quite a half a mile off. It wasn’t a long walk, but carrying the heavy twelve-packs hurt my shoulders. It was a nice enough day. I tried to count my blessings.  
I stood at the crosswalk, waiting for the walk signal, shifting from foot to foot. The car at the front of the line rolled its passenger window down, and someone shouted out.  
I got catcalled as much as any girl. It didn’t really mean anything, I knew, but it always made me sick to my stomach. I set my jaw, staring forward, as the driver yelled out a second time. A girl’s voice. Calling my name.  
The driver was a girl about my age, with big sunglasses covering up her face. She shifted her car into park and crawled over to the passenger seat, beaming. “Karen McCormick?”  
The light turned green. The cars behind her started to honk. She poked her head out of the window, giving the whole row of cars the finger and cursing at them loudly. Before she took off her sunglasses, I recognized her.  
It was like watching a cartoon you hadn’t seen since you were really little and suddenly getting all the adult jokes. It was Tricia’s baby face, the face that asked me to be best friends through a mask of spaghetti sauce, but older and leaner. And God, prettier.  
“Bitch, get in!” She yelled over the honking and shouts. If only to stop the chaos, I quickly complied. She wiggled back into the driver’s seat, leaving me room to crawl into the passenger seat, where I quickly pulled my seatbelt into place.  
She started driving as she spoke, not bothering to ask where I was headed. “Girl, I was just thinking about you a couple of days ago. Look at you! Skinny as ever.” It wasn’t a compliment, but it wasn’t an insult. “Oh my God, where have you been? Have you been in this town the whole time? Craig said your brother said you’d become, like, a nun or something.”  
I just looked at her. I didn’t even bother trying to talk. I knew it wasn’t happening.  
“Still don’t talk? That’s cool. You’re so weird. I love it. Where were you going? You know what, never mind, I don’t care. I have a job interview, but fuck it. We’re going back to my place. I’ve got so much to fill you in on. Oh, my God.”  
Dad would be mad, but I didn’t care so much. It had been almost a decade since anything this exciting had happened to me, depressingly enough.  
“Yeah so like, I’ve been working at Chile’s, but the manager was a huge see-you-next-Tuesday, and like, she’d bitch at me for dumb shit like being on my phone or wearing the wrong color pants or whatever the fuck, and eventually I was just like, ‘bitch?’ But I’ve been bumming gas money from my dad and he’s keeping this stupid ledger and he’s being a real dick about it so like, whatever, I’ll get another job just to shut him up. But I’m also kinda like, fuck it, ‘cause this car fucking sucks and it’s embarrassing just driving it around. It was my mom’s and then it was Craig’s and now it’s mine, but did you see the duct tape on the bumper? The driver’s side window doesn’t go down. Dude my license plate is hot glued on. I mean like I shouldn’t bitch about a free car, I know I’m being such a priss, but also like, why does everything I own have to be shit just because I was born later?”  
She continued to blab freely the whole drive to her house, swinging between topics like they were hanging vines, never once using her turn signal. She talked as we walked up to her house, as she let me in, as I took off my shoes, as we tromped upstairs.  
Her room was messy, but nice. She had a four poster bed—just the kind with metal bars, with a few scarves and plastic flowers wrapping around them. It wasn’t made. There were three shoes on the ground, none of which matched.  
“Christ, Karen McCormick. I think about you all the time, en-gee-el. You were so cute. You still are. God. I’m so mad at you for dropping out. Like, you’re gonna have to make that up to me, big time. Everybody else sucks. They’re all like, ‘Tricia, let’s do coke,’ ‘Tricia, let’s blow dudes’ and I’m like, oh my God, do you bitches need a nap? Like do you need to have a little time out? God, I miss you.” Present tense.  
She patted the bed beside her, inviting me to sit. Once I did, she threw her arms around my shoulders and pulled me down so that we were both lying on our begs, legs hanging off of the edge. It only occurred to me then that I hadn’t been touched in years. Maybe tapped by my mom, but no sustained contact. It’s so sad. I felt bad for me. Myself. Tears gathered heavily on my lower eyelid. When I blink, they fall in huge dollops. Tricia holds me close, looking me in the eye, still smiling.  
“I know.” She says. Her hands move to my cheeks, letting the tears run over her fingers. I open my mouth. Even now, nothing comes out. She brushes a strand of hair off of my forehead. I’m sweating, my face red. I’m not being cute. Her hands feel comfortably cold against my skin. “It’s okay. I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> pretend karen didn't talk in the poor kid and it kinda works


End file.
